Sports

Primed for PyeongChang

A guide to watching Colorado's athletes in the Games, snowsports-ese and factoids to impress your friends

By John Meyer and Jason Blevins

The Denver Post

Posted:
02/08/2018 10:03:32 PM MST

While many Americans don't regularly follow World Cup racing, the XGames or Olympic qualifiers that lead up to the Winter Olympics, it's safe to say most will be glued to the opening ceremonies Friday and all the going-for-the-gold glory that will follow.

Many of the millions who tune in to Olympic action may be coming in cold, with no knowledge of the athletes, some of the terms used and even how some events are judged. (Style, really?) That's where we come in.

We have gathered a one-stop guide, chock-full of knowledge you can use to impress your friends or just use to make sure you don't miss athletes with Colorado ties. Keep this handy until the last medal is draped over an athlete's neck.

Because here in the Centennial State we tend to breed skiers and snowboarders, we've focused on those sports. For all the Olympic action in other sports, too, stay tuned to denverpost.com/olympics.

How to watch

NBC will be covering the Games on seven platforms:

NBC broadcast network has prime-time coverage.

NBCSN and the Olympic Channel, available on cable and satellite systems, have extended coverage throughout the Olympics.

NBCOlympics.com and NBC Sports app have live streaming of every event, every sport.

CNBC and USA Network have some skiing and snowboard coverage.

Time zone difference

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What time is it, anyway?

South Korea is 16 hours ahead of Denver. If your math skills are rusty, it may be easier to figure by subtracting eight hours from Denver time and then remember it's usually (but not always) tomorrow over there. For example: The first alpine event of the Games, the men's downhill, will be held on Sunday at 11 a.m. South Korea time, which is 7 p.m. Saturday in Colorado.

Still with us? Good. Keep in mind that midday events (Korea time) will be on primetime TV in the U.S, and night time events in Korea — such as the women's skeleton races involving Breckenridge's Katie Uhlaender on Feb. 16 and 17 — will happen overnight here. Uhlaender's races start at 4:20 a.m. Mountain time, and in that instance, Denver and Korea are on the same day, because 4:20 a.m. here is 8:20 p.m. there.

Got it? Here are some conversions:

Mountain time/South Korea

6 a.m. / 10 p.m. (same day)

Noon / 4 a.m. (tomorrow)

4 p.m. / 8 a.m. (tomorrow)

6 p.m. / 10 a.m. (tomorrow)

7 p.m. / 11 a.m. (tomorrow)

8 p.m. / noon (tomorrow)

9 p.m. / 1 p.m. (tomorrow)

10 p.m. / 2 p.m. (tomorrow)

11 p.m. / 3 p.m. (tomorrow)

Midnight / 4 p.m.

Colorado athletes to watch:

Alpine racers

Mikaela Shiffrin of EagleVail stands to be the paramount star of this Olympics, and NBC will be all over covering her races. Four years ago she became the youngest Olympic slalom champion at age 18. This time she will be the overwhelming favorite in slalom and a strong medal contender in giant slalom and alpine combined (a downhill plus one run of slalom). If she chooses to race the speed events (downhill and super-G) next week, she could medal in them as well. She could well become the first American woman to win three medals in alpine skiing at one Olympics. Her first event, giant slalom, happens Feb. 11, with two runs at 6:15 p.m. and 9:45 p.m., Mountain time. The slalom will be the night of Feb. 13.

Lindsey Vonn of Vail has established herself by almost any objective measure as the greatest female ski racer of all time. She has 81 World Cup wins, more than any other woman, and only five fewer than Ingemar Stenmark's all-time record. She has won four World Cup overall (season) titles, more than any other American, and has won seven medals at skiing's world championships. The only thin spot in her record is the Olympics. Primarily a downhill and super-G racer, she took gold and bronze at the 2010 Vancouver Games but missed the 2014 Sochi Games after two crashes over the previous 12 months caused knee injuries that required surgeries to repair. Her first event, the super-G, happens Feb. 16 at 7 p.m., Mountain time.

Wiley Maple of Aspen may have grown up in a town known for attracting glitter and glamor, but he's not about that. The oft-injured 27-year-old downhiller has never finished in the top 15 of a World Cup race and has only nine top-30 finishes since 2011. As a result, he had to fork over $30,000 to race on the World Cup this season because he wasn't funded by the U.S. Skl Team. But he refuses to give up on the sport he loves, and it paid off last month when he was named to his first Olympic team. Maple isn't guaranteed to race, though, because each country can only put four racers on the hill. The first race he might appear in is the downhill, Feb. 10 at 7 p.m.

Snowboarders

Silverthorne's 17-year-old Red Gerard and 18-year-old Chris Corning, while taking different tacks to their snowboarding, are contenders for gold in snowboard slopestyle and big air. If they both land their A-runs, it's a toss up. At 6 p.m. Mountain time on Feb. 9 catch the men's slopestyle snowboarding qualifier streaming on NBCOlympics.com.

Steamboat's Arielle Gold is coming in hot this season, with new tricks and a strong mental game that she hopes bring redemption after the poorly maintained Sochi halfpipe took her out. Watch the women's halfpipe qualifier at 9:30 p.m. streaming on NBCOlympics.com or on NBC on Feb. 11. Finals will air Feb. 12, at starting at 6 p.m. on NBC or NBCOlympics.com.

In the men's halfpipe, Eagle's Jake Pates, 19, is peaking, with tricks that can rival those of Shaun White and teammate Ben Ferguson. If ever there was potential for American snowboarders to repeat a 2002 sweep in the Olympic halfpipe, this is the Games — especially after no American snowboarders reached the podium in Sochi for the first time since Olympic halfpipe snowboarding debuted in 1988. Catch the men's halfpipe qualifying live starting at at 6 p.m. on NBC.

Sliders

Colorado has never been known for athletes in the sliding sports, but it is sending three to this Olympics. Breckenridge's Katie Uhlaender finished fourth in the skeleton at the Sochi Olympics by a heartbreaking 0.04 of a second, and at age 33 she is back for her fourth Olympics.

Nate Weber, an Army Green Beret who grew up in Thornton and attended Legacy High School, is a push athlete on a four-man bobsled. Lauren Gibbs of Denver is a push athlete in women's bobsled, which consists only of two-person sleds.

Skiing and snowboarding vocabulary

Style: Snowboarding and freeskiing halfpipe and slopestyle events are judged for "overall impression." That's a somewhat subjective criteria that keeps slopestyle and halfpipe events from devolving into spinfests where the most spins automatically wins, like aerials and figure skating. Panels of judges consider progression, amplitude, variety, execution and difficulty when gauging their overall impression. It gives both judges and athletes freedom. And it amplifies style. What is style? It's when a trick looks easy. Watch Torin Yater Wallace and Chloe Kim in the pipe and Red Gerard and Gus Kenworthy on the slopestyle course. They epitomize style with a grace and casual stroll-in-the-park finesse while performing the most demanding, technical tricks in the game. Did they land a contorted spin like they were stepping off a stair? Could your grandmother recognize that they have a particular something that makes then stand out? That's style.

The skiers are progressing just as rapidly, with Sochi gold medalist David Wise this season unveiling a first-ever run with double-corks spun all four ways: forward and switch, left and right. If Wise can unleash that judge-wowing run in South Korea, he's golden.

Double-cork: While riders often create their own names for tricks — see Shaun White's Tomahawk and Skyhook — most of the Olympic-caliber halfpipe skiers and snowboarders are throwing variations of the double-cork, two vertical flips while spinning dizzying horizontal rotations. (Remember those toy gyroscopes as a kid? Imagine that, but instead of a toy, it's an acrobatic person about 40 feet above an icy ditch.)

Rotations: Variations of 360 degrees. So a 1260? Three rotations. While the pipe skiers and riders haven't gone beyond the 1260, slopestyle athletes have pushed deeper with 1440s and even 1620s. 1980? Not yet, but close.

Backside, frontside, cab, switch: Frontside is a spin facing forward, and backside is spun with the snowboarder looking over his shoulder and spinning backwards. Switch means a snowboarder is leading with their less-dominant leg. Some riders, namely Chloe Kim, barely have a less-dominant direction. (That's probably because as a kid her father required that she spend an entire season riding nothing but switch.) A switch frontside spin is generally called "cab." For skiers, switch is more obvious — they are going backwards.

Alley-oop: Those are rotations spun up the pipe, not down. Changing the trajectory of your spinning against forward momentum makes for one of the most beautiful tricks in the pipe. Watch skier Torin Yater Wallace's penultimate hit to see the best alley-oop in the game.

Technical: You will hear this word used to describe races and sections of courses. It refers to the technique required to make precision turns on hardened race courses. Hence there are technical races (the events with the most turns, slalom and giant slalom), as opposed to the speed races (downhill and super-G). But you also will hear references to technical ("turny") sections of downhill and super-G courses, as opposed to the gliding sections that are relatively more flat.

Triple, quad: In slopestyle, the tricks have progressed beyond double-corks to triple- and even quad-corks. At last month's Aspen X Games, Canadian Max Parrot stomped a cab triple-cork 1800 — five switch frontside spins while backflipping three times — to win his second big air gold medal in as many years. Yuki Kanodo, a Japanese rider, tried to land the first-ever backside quad 1980 — a boggling five-and-a-half spins while flipping four times.

Flat light: On an overcast day, shadows disappear and visibility suffers. It becomes harder for racers to see ruts or bumps in the snow because everything blends into fuzzy whiteness, especially at the highway speeds that are typical in downhill and super-G. Flat light makes racing more dangerous and more frightening. Vonn says she loves flat light because she knows some of the women in the field will be afraid to take risks and thus defeated before they start.

Jumps: Downhill courses usually have a couple of jumps that launch racers 150 feet or more down the hill. Racers need to hit those jumps in a good balanced position to avoid flailing in the air and crashing.

Gliding: A good downhill course has sections of difficult high-speed turns but also sections of gliding, where racers get in an aerodynamic tuck and ride relatively flat skis, minimizing friction on their edges. Turning is a skill, but so is gliding. Racers who are good gliders know how to get the most out of relatively flat sections of the course. It also helps to be heavy through these sections, because gravity helps in gliding. Smaller racers are at a disadvantage.

Ruts: Courses will deteriorate over the duration of a race and develop ruts, caused by skis damaging the surface. Ruts can be a big factor, especially in slalom. Let's say Shiffrin has the fastest time in the first run of slalom. That means she will be the 30th racer on the course in the second run, and because of ruts she could face a much more difficult course than those who went in the top 10 or 20.

Impress your friends

Where does the term "slalom" come from?

The origins of competitive skiing go back to 19th century Norway, where contests included cross country, ski jumping and slalom, which roughly means a track on a smooth and slanting hill. Slalom became a generic term for downhill races there, but Norway remained more focused on Nordic skiing (cross country and ski jumping) while St. Anton, Austria, became the cradle of alpine skiing — otherwise known as downhill skiing — which now consists of slalom, giant slalom, super-G and downhill.

How fast do they go in downhill?

Ski racers routinely top out at speeds that will get you ticketed on interstate highways. The top speed this year at the famed downhill at Kitzbuehel, Austria, was 87 mph, and speeds at Wengen, Switzerland, exceeded 90 mph. Speeds vary from venue to venue, though. When the men raced downhill on the PyeongChang course in 2016, the top speed was 71 mph. When the women raced there last year, Vonn posted the top speed of 61 mph. She finished second in that race to Italy's Sofia Goggia by 0.07 of a second.

In alpine racing, what's the difference between technical races and speed races?

The technical races are slalom and giant slalom; they involve more turns and, as a result, slower speeds than the speed races. The speed races are downhill (highest speeds, fewest turns) and super-G (more turns with slower speeds than downhill, but faster than giant slalom). Oh, and you don't want to say "giant slalom." You want to call it GS.

How do they decide who races?

In alpine racing, making the Olympic team doesn't guarantee a racer will get to compete. Each country can enter only four racers in each alpine event, which is fewer than they typically get on the World Cup. Teams sometimes use downhill training at the Olympic venue as time trials to make decisions about the last spot or two, because downhill training results can indicate which racer is better suited to the course. Alice McKennis of Glenwood Springs is ranked fifth among the U.S. women downhillers, but if Shiffrin elects not to race downhill, her spot could go to McKennis. McKennis would appear to be in good shape for the super-G, but coaches still make the decision on who races.

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